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| Sunday, 1 December 2002 |
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Thomians open christmas season today by Karel Roberts Ratnaweera As they have been doing for more than fifty years, S. Thomas' College, Mt. Lavinia will ring in the Christmas season today, December 1st, with its famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Chapel of the Transfiguration, beginning at 6.00 p.m. This Festival is always held on the first Sunday in December, and happily, this year, that date falls today. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is a traditional English Festival most famously celebrated in the chapel of Kings College, Cambridge,which has one of the world's greatest choirs, and on which the Thomian Festival is based. The service is ceremonial and stately,in accordance with Anglican tradition, with the Lord Bishop of Colombo being the Chief Celebrant. A hushed chapel, with only the whisperings of the huge congregation and soft notes from the organ loft, awaits the entrance to the chapel from the great west door of priests, choristers, deacons, sacristans and other participants in the service. As the chapel bell is rung, announcing the start of the proceedings, the first verse of the Processional Hymn Once in Royals David's City is sung, solo, by a chosen chorister whose voice has yet to mature. This is a tradition of the Festival. As the procession moves with solemn dignity up the aisle in clouds of incense, organ and congregation take up the famous Christmas hymn. The Lessons are read by The Lord Bishop, the Chaplain of S. Thomas', the Warden, sub Warden,the Head Prefect of the college and others. In between, the finest and most famous Christmas hymns, some dating from the Middle Ages, are sung, and the famous choir of S. Thomas' is heard at its unrivalled best, accompanied by the organ played by the unrivalled Russel Bartholomeusz. Hymns usually include such famous ones as Good King Wenceslaus which exhorts Christian men to be sure, wealth and rank possessing, to help the poor they themselves shall find blessing. Director of the choir Russel Bartholomeusz, also always includes a 'modern' hymn or two to offset the medieval character of the traditional English hymns. The Festival ends with the Great Recessional Hymn, O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) as the procession recedes to the great west door where, the sight that meets the eyes of all who file out is as great as the service itself; the quadrangle of S. Thomas' is ringed with oil lamps flickering in the now dark evening, with the Thomian emblem crowned by the letters STC in jets dominating the scene. This is the work of the non Christian students of the college who, as the service proceeds inside the chapel, light up the quadrangle as a labour of love for their alma mater in what must surely be one of the greatest examples of ecumenism to be seen. |
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